What the review reports
The review covers determinations made between April 2025 and March 2026. The Ombudsman reports more investigations but a lower proportion of upheld complaints, while serious repair failures continued to affect residents.
It cautions that from October 2025 it examined complaint handling in every investigated case. That change affects comparisons with earlier years. The review discusses differences between landlords and regions, remedies, equality issues and the use of individual landlord performance reports.
Alongside the annual figures, it identifies a separate emerging concern from early 2026–27 Awaab’s Law casework: some teams struggled to recognise applicable cases and use the correct timescales. It recommends auditing complaint-handling arrangements. Those early observations should not be confused with the reporting period of the annual statistics.
Source: Housing Ombudsman — Annual Complaints Review 2025-26